Is Disruptive Innovation Really Such A Good Thing?

This week I read an essay by Health Futures President Jeff Goldsmith which made a case for moving beyond a much-beloved way of thinking about innovation and growth.

In his essay, which appeared in The Health Care Blog, author Goldsmith argues that the concept of disruption as having “passed its sell-by date” after mass adoption by those who see it as gospel.

To be certain, there’s much to admire in the theory, which was outlined by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

In this book, Christensen defines disruptive innovation as the process in which a smaller company with fewer resources gradually takes over a market niche by capturing customers at the bottom of the market.

We’re all familiar with how this plays out. The once-tiny bookseller Amazon trounces brick-and-mortar bookstores and eventually the entire retail e-commerce sector.  Apple rolls out the smartphone and it transforms the way we consume and use digital information, steamrolling its way into new markets and eating the lunch of countless companies in this space. And so on.

Over the 25 years since it was introduced, the disruption thesis has become a core concept in the venture capital and private equity worlds. This includes, of course, VCs focused on health technology investments. As a writer covering HIT, I have been bombarded with public relations pitches insisting that a given healthtech startup was going to “disrupt” whatever niche in which they were found.

The problem is, like any model it has limitations. One of the greatest problems with the notion of disruptive innovation is that it’s become the standard for tech entrepreneurs. Health IT leaders are sometimes dazzled by vendors claiming that they can provide market-shifting disruptive technology, but in my experience, this rarely pans out as promised.

The truth is, many – if not most – of the most important health IT tools in use today have emerged from long periods of incubation and struggle rather than capsizing an entire industry.

Take wearables, for example. Vendors have been pitching them for more than a decade, but they’ve only come into their own over the past year or two, as hospitals used them as remote monitoring tools that could track patients in their homes.

Even now, though, after many years of experimentation, we still haven’t reached a consensus on how to take advantage of wearables’ full capabilities.  The day will come when they’re widely used for remote patient monitoring and public health surveillance, but that day may be further ahead than you’d expect.

Telemedicine also has a long history and has actually been in use for decades. In the past, it was only available to those who could afford to build out a costly video infrastructure. However, when broadband Internet and video interfaces became cheap and reliable, telemedicine gradually gained a higher profile. With its use during the pandemic, it’s become far more familiar to providers and patients, but it’s still far from a mass-market darling.

Now, however, a far greater number of consumers have tried out telemedicine visits – but it still hasn’t become a day-to-day go-to for many providers and patients. Though telemedicine adoption has climbed steadily over time, it continues to be a long game.

I agree with Goldsmith. Too many people are invested in creating a disruptive product or service and failing to tackle mundane problems like fixing what’s broken or seizing opportunities that are right in front of them.